Liliane Steiner, PhD, is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Head of the Unit of Continuing Education, Hemdat Hadarom Academic College, and lecturer in the English Department at this college. Steiner is the author of two academic books: The Interaction Between the Sexes: The Post- abjection of The Archaic Mother, and Between Breastfeeding and Final Tests (in press). Her research fields are: gender and feminism, Holocaust studies, comparative literature, French philosophy and literature, children's literature, and teachers’ education.

Broken Wor(l)ds: Rutka's Notebook

Liliane Steiner

Abstract

Rutka's Notebook is a diary kept by a young Jewish girl who lived in Bedzin, Poland during the Holocaust. Rutka Laskier started to keep her diary four months before she was deported to Auschwitz. In this diary, written in a school notebook, she recounts her adolescent life in the ghetto as well as her distress vis-à-vis the atrocities the Nazis inflicted upon her and her people. Aware of the risk she ran to be moved to Kamionka, Rutka agreed with Stanislava Sapinska, the apartment owners' daughter whom she had befriended, that she would hide her notebook in the apartment before leaving. In 1945, when the war was over, Sapinska returned to the apartment and found the diary in the place Rutka had indicated to her back in 1943.